For A Few Souls More (Heaven's Gate Book 3) Read online

  “We need to speak to Alonzo,” said Joe. “He’s the only one who can explain any of this.”

  He moved to the window as if expecting to be able to see the man—if that word fits, and it doesn’t, but forgive me, our lexicon was not built for the stories I must tell.

  “He meant this to happen,” said Hope. “You heard what Mr Jones said. They’d talked about him killing God. Alonzo planned it.”

  I found myself staring at the remains of our food, splattered against one of the white walls by a sweep of Alonzo’s arm. “He planned a lot of things. What was he saying before he left? A sacrifice?”

  “He certainly got one of those,” said Joe, looking at the body beneath his jacket.

  Again, my hindsight comes into play. The sacrifice Alonzo intended was not the death of God—or, not just that—it was the planned collision of the vehicle on which I had so recently travelled, the Forset Land Carriage, with the impenetrable barrier that surrounded Wormwood. A rather dull sacrifice you might think, but the Land Carriage contained a number of highly-delicate and dangerous pieces of equipment, some of which, if ignited, would have reduced the entire plain, and the many that camped on it, to ash. It would have been a disaster of suitably Biblical proportions. It is thanks to the sterling work of my old colleagues, most particularly Forset’s daughter, Elisabeth, that the accident was averted. At the time, however, none of us could have known that.

  “The room,” said Hope. “His...” she struggled to remember the name Alonzo had given it, “Observation Lounge.”

  The name was unfamiliar to me, but they soon explained it was a room in which Alonzo had maintained a watch on all of creation.

  “If he’s not there, we’ll certainly be able to find him,” Joe said.

  We filed out of the dining room, making our way along one of the many featureless corridors. I remember thinking, as I had several times, how it could be that Heaven was so empty. Surely, even in a place so vast one would expect to occasionally chance upon another holy soul. Could Heaven really be as vacant as it seemed?

  CHAPTER TWO

  DEATH KNOWS NO TIME

  1.

  ARNO JAMES HAD always been told that his charity would be the death of him.

  “One day,” his long-suffering wife had insisted, “someone’s going to take advantage of that big, soft head of yours and put a bullet in it.”

  It was some small consolation to him as he lay bleeding, his final thoughts fixated on the weathered state of the barn roof struts above him, that she had been wrong. It hadn’t been his charity work, it had been her lover, deciding that, after a couple of months of sneaking behind his back, it would be altogether easier to just brain him with a spade.

  “We thought it was one of the Klinton Gang,” his wife sobbed in a performance of considerable weight as the sheriff looked down at his cold body. “Who knows what he was doing sneaking around in the barn like an intruder? Thank the Lord that Zeke had dropped by, otherwise I would have been defenceless.”

  The sheriff, a wily old bastard that had no doubt as to the real story, pointed out that maybe it hadn’t been such a blessing after all. If Zeke had been at home in his own bed, Arno James would still be working the fields rather than growing as stiff as wood.

  However much he may have known in his gut that poor old Arno had been removed as an unwanted complication, he couldn’t offer proof. Within a week, the man’s widow and her new beau had been on the trail to Denver with their combined savings.

  Arno, meanwhile, had woken in a garden. Albeit not the sort of garden he could ever have imagined tending himself. This wasn’t a place of dry lawn and patchy daisies, it was a bright, dreamy landscape of the mind. The trees above his head glistened, their branches creaking and waving despite the lack of wind. The grass beneath his fingers felt as crisp as sugar and, sitting up, he was forced to squint as the reflections from a nearby stream flickered in front of his eyes. He touched his face, wanting to feel something he could believe in. He covered his eyes for a moment, pushing the vision of the garden away so that he could think. His ears still rang with the resounding clatter of the spade connecting against his skull. There was no pain, just a sense of dislocation, an awareness, right down in his very soul, that he had stepped out of one existence and into another.

  The religious implications of this took a moment to kick in. Arno, despite having regularly bent his knee within the narrow confines of the ramshackle pews of the St. Bartholomew tabernacle, did not automatically assume himself to be in Heaven. His religious devotions, while deeply felt, were singularly elsewhere as his logical mind looked around and tried to put two and two together. Dying is something you never develop any experience in and, consequently, most folks hesitate to assume it’s just happened to them.

  Uncovering his eyes, Arno got to his feet and began to explore the world he’d been re-born into. The ground gave slightly beneath his feet, soft and pliant as only earth can be.

  He looked down at his clothes. They were dreams of garments that had hung in his own closet. He ran his thumb along the hem of the jacket, finding none of the loose threads or repairs that were as much a part of the original as the scar on his temple. Reminded of it, he reached to touch that little nub of white skin, an imperfection he’d carried for years ever since catching it on the underside of a shelf in the barn. It was there. It was a comfort.

  He made his way towards the stream, his eyes slowly adapting to the sparkling light.

  Squatting down on the bank, he extended his hand into the water. There was no chill and he could barely feel it, rushing over his hand like thick air.

  “Paradise?” he wondered. And again, that thought of where he might be crossed his mind only for him to dismiss it again.

  What was needed, he decided, was to find someone else.

  He followed the bank of the stream, the grass crunching beneath his feet like winter frost.

  The trees around him were like those drawn by a lazy artist; they were trees of the imagination, not any species he recognised. Pulling down a branch he looked closer at the cluster of fruit growing on one of them. It appeared to be a bunch of precious stones, cut as if for royalty to hang on their puffy, white necks. As he squeezed them between thumb and forefinger they crumbled, wet and sticky. He raised his fingers to his lips and then decided against it, who knew if it was safe? He wiped the glistening dirt on his trousers instead, happy to make the cloth a little less perfect.

  After a short while he came to a bridge that crossed the stream. He crossed it, figuring a bridge had to lead to somewhere.

  On the other side, a narrow path made its way through a forest of the unknown trees, the fruit different from branch to branch.

  As the trees began to thin out he found himself facing a large building, built from white stone that seemed to glow with an inner light all of its own. The building rose up further than he could see, a stretch of white bricks and windows that grew more indistinct as it soared upwards into the clear sky. To his right there was a wall vanishing back into the forest through which he had just walked. To his left, in the far distance, he thought he could just about make out another. It would seem he had been in a courtyard all this time, one big enough to hold Wyoming.

  Cloisters lined the walls. At the junction to his right, a stairway led upwards.

  It was as good a direction as any and Arno climbed the stairs to the next floor.

  He found himself in a corridor lined with doors on one side and windows on the other.

  “Hello?” he called. “Anyone here?”

  His voice echoed along the corridor but there was no reply.

  He walked to the first door and opened it. Inside was a completely empty room. A large white box, no furniture, no decoration.

  Arno stepped back out and moved along the corridor to the next. It was the same. As was the next.

  Sharp enough to sense a theme when presented with it, he returned to the stairs and decided to climb higher. If nothing else he would be
able to get a good view of the courtyard from a few more floors up.

  As he walked up the stairs the only sound was his own footsteps. As they echoed around the white walls his thoughts turned back to philosophical matters. Was it possible that this was Hell rather than Heaven? For all its sterile beauty he couldn’t imagine passing a pleasant eternity in it.

  After he’d ascended a few more floors, he stepped out into an identical corridor to the one below. He walked to the first room and put his hand on the door handle. It buzzed beneath his skin with a prickling sensation that he would have immediately thought of as a faint electrical charge had he been born a few decades later. For all such a sensation might have seemed an omen of revelations, the door opened once more onto a blank room. He tried one more, with the same result, before moving to look out over the expansive courtyard, a genuine sense of panic building inside him.

  Surely this excessive place, a building that bordered on the infinite, couldn’t be empty? If so then he must be in Hell, destined to endure the passing decades opening door after door onto nothing.

  He looked down on the trees and the garden, tracing the path of the stream. Even this felt like a pretence of perfection, a fragile, child’s idea of paradise that glittered only on the surface.

  Arno James began to consider what he’d done wrong in life to end up in this candy-coated shell of a world. Had he not tried to be a good man? Had he not dedicated much of his life to helping others? Indeed, that had been his wife’s persistent complaint, that he lavished more time on strangers than he did on her. Maybe that had been his mistake. Was this fabricated Heaven the Hell where all bad husbands found themselves? Was it a kind of mockery? A joke? The bitter punchline at the end of a life lived with an eye on sanctity?

  His mood was sinking lower and lower, when a sudden glimpse of movement in the trees below tugged him out of self-pity. It was a woman, dressed in light, summer clothes. Her head was down, watching where she placed her feet.

  “Hey!” he called, as the figure vanished beneath the cover of the trees. “Hey, wait!”

  He ran for the stairs, trying not to calculate how long it would take him to reach the ground level and move back into the garden. Surely, if she hadn’t heard him—and she had made no sign of having done so—she would be long gone before he was even back in the open air.

  In his panic, he lost his footing on the stairs and the world around him spun in confusion as he tumbled, a brief, disorientating moment of up becoming down and left becoming right. There was just time for a spark of fear, anticipating the damage he might be about to do to himself, his body colliding with the hard steps, before he suddenly came to rest, flat on his back. He was unhurt—how can you hurt something that’s already dead? he wondered—and, against all reason, back in the courtyard, having somehow bypassed the several floors he’d climbed.

  His sense of urgency returned. He could wonder about the geographic rules of this place later, the most important thing was to catch up with the woman.

  “Hello!” he called, running towards the bridge and the spot in the trees where he estimated he had last seen her. “Please, wait.”

  He crossed the stream and crashed clumsily through the thin lower branches of the trees, their wood and fruit spraying around him like wedding rice.

  She was gone, he was sure of it. Despite the time he had gained by somehow skipping the several floors of stairs, he had been too slow and the key to understanding his new world had slipped through his fingers. He hadn’t imagined her, there was that at least; he refused to doubt what he had seen and something seen once could be seen again, even in this massive place.

  “Hello,” said a voice from above. “Are you the one who’s been shouting?”

  He looked up to see the woman sat on a branch, her feet a few inches from the top of his head.

  “Yes,” he admitted, “sorry, but I wanted to talk to you.”

  “So talk,” she smiled, swinging her legs like a child on a swing, a woman utterly at peace with her day.

  “Well, I woke up here,” he explained, “a short while ago and I don’t know where I am and what to do and...”

  “You don’t know much, do you?” she laughed.

  “I don’t know anything,” he admitted.

  “Except for one little thing, I imagine?” she asked.

  “I’m dead?”

  She nodded. “And what a relief that is, isn’t it? If I’d known that I could find such peace as this I would have tied a noose around my neck long ago.”

  “Suicide’s a sin.”

  “Sins are what we make them.”

  She swung her leg over the branch and slowly lowered herself to the ground.

  She was, Arno realised, much older than her behaviour suggested. She was a woman in her late forties, perhaps early fifties, once more returned to a state of carefree childhood. Her face bore only happy lines, creases caused by cheerfulness, the after-effects of countless smiles. Her hair was greying here and there but she wore it long and it trailed down her back like a light coloured shawl over her bright, white cotton dress.

  “Veronica,” she said, holding out her hand for him to take.

  He shook it gently. “Arno. Arno James.”

  “So you’re confused by the afterlife, Arno James?” she asked. “And so you should be. It’s a confusing, if miraculous, place.”

  “It seems so empty.”

  “That’s part of its charm, isn’t it? Who wants to spend eternity in a crowd?”

  “Well, maybe,” Arno considered himself a fairly social person, and while it would depend on the crowd he had no problem with the idea of a little company in Heaven.

  “Am I the first person you’ve met?” she asked. Arno nodded. “Oh dear, how disorganised of them. I’m sure Alonzo should have greeted you. Shown you the ropes, as I believe they say in naval circles.”

  “Alonzo?”

  “He’s in charge,” she explained, “well, no, I suppose He’s in charge.” She gestured upwards and then laughed. “How silly, I’m pointing towards the heavens even though I’m stood in them. Still, we never see Him, or hear Him for that matter. Alonzo is the manager I suppose, the human face that makes us feel at home. He really should have found you, you know.”

  “Oh.” Arno tried to shake the feeling that she somehow considered this to be his fault. “Well I have been walking around a lot.”

  “And shouting.”

  “I thought there was nobody else here, I was...” Arno decided there was no point in being less than honest, “scared.”

  “Silly boy,” she said, taking his arm and leading him back towards the stream. “There’s nothing to be scared of here. All that’s behind us now.”

  “I was exploring the building over there.”

  “The Junction. The place of travelling.”

  “Just a lot of empty rooms from what I could tell.”

  “Then you were looking at them wrong. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  She led him back towards the cloisters at the edge of the courtyard.

  “Where were you from?” he asked as the building grew large before them.

  “Oh, nowhere important,” she said, “a boring little town filled with boring little people. I lived through a succession of droning conversations, a grey old life where I didn’t fit in. Here’s much nicer. Which, of course, is exactly as it should be.”

  “I came from Walsenburg, Colorado,” he told her, though she hadn’t asked. “I had my skull beaten in by a spade.”

  “It sounds perfectly dreary.”

  He tapped at his scalp with his fingers. “Maybe I’m just dreaming all this.”

  “Don’t start doubting,” she told him, “it’s tiresome. You’re dead and that’s that.”

  “Yes,” he admitted, because he knew the truth of it, despite his momentary thought otherwise, had done so from the very moment he’d woken up.

  They had reached the cloisters now and Veronica led him to the door of the first room he’d tried
earlier.

  “I’ve already looked in there,” he said. “It was nothing but an empty, white chamber.”

  “Shush now, let me show you the secret of it. The Junction is where we come to travel. To experience whatever our minds can imagine.”

  She opened the door and Arno found himself looking in on a pebbled beach. The sea crashed against the stones, retreating with the soft crackle of water sucked out from between the pebbles.

  “After you,” said Veronica, gesturing for him to step inside.

  Arno did as he was told, walking cautiously on the stones and gazing out on a wide horizon as pale as milk, the sea and sky blurring where they touched.

  “It was empty before,” he said, “I assure you.”

  “It’s as empty as you allow it to be,” she said, and tapped at her temple. “These doors lead to wherever we dream of but the suggestion has to come from us. These are our rooms, built to our design. You’ll get the hang of it.”

  Arno looked up the shore. The cliffs that marked the edge of the beach rose up to plain grass. Against the sun he saw a group of children playing. The sound of singing filtered down, just audible over the waves.